DeTour Village ― Superintendents often like to boast about scholarship winners and impressive athletic achievements in their district.
DeTour Area Schools has those, but Superintendent Robert Vaught prefers to highlight one student’s more unusual feat — taking down a 503-pound black bear while hunting with his grandfather on Drummond Island last fall.
Vaught keeps a photo of the 14-year-old student and the bear on his tablet, recently showing a Detroit News reporter what makes life in this tiny district on the far eastern end of the Upper Peninsula so different from those downstate.
“Notice we have cameras everywhere, but not for what you think,” said Vaught, whose parents graduated from the U.P. district, just as he did. “We had to cancel recess because we had a bobcat on the playground. And then there was a bear on the football field.”
DeTour operates two districts, a traditional and a charter, that serve about 152 students on the mainland and on Drummond Island. The News paid a visit there this past fall to speak to educators, students and staff about the challenges of operating a school district in an isolated area.
During The News’ visit, educators and parents at DeTour schools spoke about their love for life in the U.P., even if grocery store runs take more than an hour and shopping for prom and homecoming must be done downstate or in the Soo.
No one described it as boring. In fact, there is often a lot of excitement in and around school, where it’s an all-hands-on-deck approach to educating, transporting and caring for the kids.
Lindsey McGuire staffs the desk outside Vaught’s office in DeTour, juggling five jobs in the district and multitasking by the hour on this school day in September.
“I’m the administrative assistant and the pupil accountant, and HR and the data manager … and I do payroll,” McGuire said of her multiple full-time jobs.
Her boss, Vaught, is constantly on the go, greeting students after they have taken the ferry over from Drummond Island or arrived via one of six bus routes the district runs each school day.
A Navy veteran who speaks French, Vaught also drives the school bus, serves food in the school’s gymnasium, plows snow in the winter, and has been known to change diapers in the early education center when the job needed to get done.
”Whatever pops up, we have to handle it at the time. You name it, I’ve done it,” Vaught said. “I’ll mow the lawn. I’ll do whatever it takes, and everybody else does the same thing. We all wear different hats. Nobody has ‘this is my job, and this is all that I do.’”
Long bus rides are part of life in a district that operates six daily bus routes. One is 70 miles long, and another is 90 miles.
“Transportation is especially challenging because we just don’t have enough drivers,” said Randy MacDowell, the district’s transportation director and its mechanic, janitor, groundskeeper and water tester. “We have extra runs this week in sports, and one of our drivers just took the week off.”
The negative-30-degree wind chill in January has taken its toll on the school buses. Buses break down, brakes freeze up.
Last school year, bus drivers covered 111,000 total miles for student runs, including 13,000 miles for athletics, 16,000 miles for career-technical education students and programs, and 16,000 miles for special education runs to the town of Kinross.
Of its $5.54 million school budget, about 8% or $490,000, went to transportation last school year. On any given day, MacDowell or Vaught or anyone else who is able will drive the bus.
“You don’t hear much of ‘that’s not my job.’ Everybody just kicks in,” said MacDowell, who worked at the state prison for 28 years before coming to the district.
To ease transportation challenges, Vaught is fighting for permission from the state to use a 15-passenger van to transport his students and athletes throughout the U.P. and northern Michigan. It would require a change in the law, he says.
The district, along with its historic rival, Cedarville, combined several years ago to compete in sports and create the Cedarville-DeTour Islanders Athletics, which operates an eight-player football team.
“Right now, we’re limited to nine passengers and the driver, so it’s (essentially) a 10-passenger van. At times, I have to put four or five kids in a full-size bus and drive them to Rudyard or Pickford or wherever,” said Vaught of the U.P. towns, which are 58 miles and 36 miles away, respectively.
“If I had a 15-passenger van, I could fit my teams on it.”
Due to low enrollment, split-grade classrooms are common on Drummond Island, where teacher Danna Barrette says she initially had to think about how to accommodate teaching two different grades in the same classroom of 10 students.
“So we have two curriculums, and I work with whichever group I think can work more independently,” Barrette said. “So oftentimes I introduce (concepts) to my first grade first because they’re more independent and able to work independently. And then they go to work, and then our kindergarten friends will come, and they’ll join me here at the table. It’s more intimate, and then we can kind of get right into the writing of letters and pictures.”
Kylee Thompson, a parent of two children in the DeTour district, values the small-town attention her two sons are receiving in DeTour schools.
Her sons, Charlie and Oliver, are enrolled in preschool and kindergarten. The family lives right in DeTour village, near the school, but the kids will take the bus some days.
“I really like that it’s a small school, so they get a lot of one-on-one time with the teacher and a lot of learning,” Thompson said as Charlie played happily in his preschool class. “And they’re really close with their classmates.” Darcy Newell is a 2012 graduate of DeTour Schools and left to attend college in the Soo for a few years. She returned to DeTour, met her now-husband and works as a substitute librarian for DeTour schools.
“Something about this town just brings you back,” Newell said. “All my family’s from here. We’re four generations from this school. We’ve all graduated from here, grandparents, parents. That brought me back.”
jchambers@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: From bears to bobcats, tiny U.P. district rises to challenges
Reporting by Jennifer Chambers, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
